Muriel Gray - The Trickster

MURIEL GRAY

Harper Voyager an imprint of

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2015

Copyright © Muriel Gray 1994, 2015

Introduction © Mark Millar 2015

Cover photograph © Sverrir Thorolfsson Iceland/Getty Images

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008158248

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008134730

Version: 2015-10-14

For

Hamish MacVinish Barbour

and Hector Adam Barbour.

With love.

Contents

Cover

Title Page MURIEL GRAY

Copyright Harper Voyager an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2015 Copyright © Muriel Gray 1994, 2015 Introduction © Mark Millar 2015 Cover photograph © Sverrir Thorolfsson Iceland/Getty Images Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015 Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008158248 Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008134730 Version: 2015-10-14

Dedication For Hamish MacVinish Barbour and Hector Adam Barbour. With love.

Preface to the 20th anniversary edition

Introduction

Chapter 1: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 54

Chapter 55: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Keep Reading

Furnace: Chapter 1

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By the Author

About the Publisher

Here’s a confession. If The Trickster had been written today instead of twenty years ago it would probably be a much lazier book. There was no internet in 1994. Well, there was a sort of internet. It was called ‘a library’.

The story grew after a two-month winter stay in the Canadian Rockies, in and around the Alberta town of Banff, named after the Aberdeenshire town by the Scots who built the great railway that opened up Western Canada to the world. That fascinating historical connection, combined with the local Native Canadian lore and backdrop of fiercely beautiful, unforgiving mountain landscape, would set any imagination alight. And it did.

The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway alone is enough to fill a whole library of books, as indeed it has, as I discovered when I set out to find more, poring over volumes in Glasgow’s grand Mitchell Library.

But as the story evolved around the native people, whose land this had been long before the Scots and their Chinese labourers arrived to lay iron rails through previously unnavigable wilderness, it was clear there was only one way to gather accurate information. Go back and talk to them.

I was warned by local non-native Canadians that trying to gain access to the Stoney Indian Tribe, whose First Nation reserve lies to the east of Banff by the small town of Cochrane, was all but impossible. Wary of outsiders, with a depressing range of serious social problems, these were not people who would be instantly eager to share tales of their ancestors with a stranger from Scotland.

But since the clan motto ‘Hold Fast Craigellachie’ was the telegram sent to the team leader nearing exhaustion during the railway construction’s most challenging section, it seemed right to follow suit.

To meet a reserve resident you make a date and a place, and then you go and wait. They don’t turn up. Well, they do. They watch you from afar. And if you keep coming back at the right time and the right place then eventually they come too.

It took nearly two weeks. Same place, same time, every single day. And then suddenly, one day I was in. My guide was a young woman, Co-Co Powderface, a champion barrel-rider and hunter. We talked and talked. We visited her home, a corrugated iron hand-built house, the tiny shack of her grandmother, a non-English speaker, and the surprise was that everything about it was resonant of lives I’d seen as a child in Scotland, when travelling in the Outer Hebrides and the far north Highlands. Strangely familiar territory.

Over the days we spent with Co-Co, her grandmother, through translation, told tales of shape shifting, of travelling hundreds of miles in minutes, of the spirits and their lives, and miserably, of darker things in their community, horribly real and human and indisputable.

So it’s to her, her family and her people I dedicate this new edition. Had I been able to travel there by clicking the internet, to browse through their myths and legends, idly gaze at photographs of First Nations reserves and forums about cultural practices and problems, I would never have had the privilege of meeting them.